Some Philosophical Questions about Computers and Go

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    Keywords: Software

Please feel free to answer a question, pose a new one, rant about the author, etc.

How long will it be until a computer is clearly the Go champion?

Bill: And Black makes 8 more plays than White. (Pointed out by Fujisawa Hideyuki, IIRC).
    • If they are playing on a 21x21 board, then W wins by 17 points. The two boards are about equidistant from this fabled point. In any case, I see nothing special about the third and fourth lines. Go is undoubtedly a deeper game the larger the board, and historically the standard board has kept growing in size. The limiting factor is probably the time needed to make all the moves, which of course grows quadratically. -- Saesneg
    • quadratically - It grows a little more complicated than that. The number of intersections grows quadratically indeed. There are, however two contrary influences on the increase of the time needed.
      • Some evidence suggests that the number of moves to dispute the same amount of intersections decreases with the size of the board.
      • The complexity of the individual moves increases with the increased number of possible moves. -- mAsterdam
    • It hasn't grown that substantially. The "classic" old board is 17x17 and the current board is 19x19. The reason for sticking with a 19x19 as opposed to a 21x21 is that the go academics felt anything larger than 19x19 would be near impossible for a human to reaonsably read. The combinations and possiblities would be too vast. As for the time it takes to play out, in spite of the increase in possible combinations and moves, I don't believe it would be much greater than a 19x19. People rarely fill every intersection on the board, and with bigger sizes there would likely bie larger alive territories. Sure, you can play on any size you want, but players of old have long considered a 21x21 board and still opted to stay with a 19x19. But when you're dealing with AIs, it would be folly to concern yourself with larger boards when you can't even handle a 19x19. -- LeiMagnus
  • I'm going to conjecture that there exists an A(n) algorithm for deciding upon the best move in a board position, where n is the size of the board (in intersections). For those who haven't seen this notation, I'm saying that the average time taken by the algorithm to find the best move (on a board with n intersections) is bounded by n multiplied by some constant (which we may or may not know). To put it another way, for an arbitrarily large board, doubling the size of the (edge of the) board will not make the task of finding the correct move significantly more than four times as hard. --Bildstein

If a computer becomes champ, will Go still be interesting?

Go exposes moral character, so computer Go players will always suck at some wabi/sabi level?

When a computer becomes champ, will anyone care?

Intuition is likely unreliable in these matters

As a strong computer programmer (with an interest in AI), and a weak Go player, I'd be very reluctant to make judgements about computer Go. It's obviously a very hard problem, but I think that for someone's intuition about computer Go to be especially valuable, they'd need to be an upper-level dan player and have a talent for innovative AI solutions. There's a couple of possibilities, none of which are mutually exclusive, and it isn't easy to guess which might apply:

Rarely are interesting AI problems solved by search. It's often a leaden, uninspired technique. You've got to look for either a sudden insight or a methodical understanding of the actual problem.

A lot of supposedly hard "AI" problems get partially solved when somebody comes up a key insight--for example, the MIT "eigenfaces" algorithm boosted face recognition from 20% to 90+% accuracy by applying undergraduate statistics cleverly. Spam filtering went from horrible to 98+% accuracy with the discovery of a clever hack inspired by Bayesian probabilities.

Other times, progress in "AI" problems comes from dutiful enumeration--and tweaking--of hundreds of rules. For example, look at the sudden jump in bot quality in Counter Strike: Condition Zero. This was based on a few clever algorithms and lots of hard work, carefully enumerating hundreds of human-like behaviors and limitations, and testing their interactions extensively. The end result is fairly similar to playing against real humans, but only because the author was an expert Counter Strike player.

Thus, any workable solution to computer Go is likely to be surprising in nature. Certainly no low-level Go player understands the game well enough to know what problems need to be solved to play at a consistent 1p level, and few professional dans have spent enough time studying AI to have a good intuition for what novel techniques might be available. Even then, a few hundred dan-level AI hackers could overlook important tricks for a decade or two, only to be surprised by an AI "tesuji".


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This is a copy of the living page "Some Philosophical Questions about Computers and Go" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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